The alarm wasn't a sound; it was a jolt of pure agony fired directly into her neural pathways. Astra Nova launched herself from her tactical suspension throne, the cables at her spine接口 disconnecting like silver serpents.
"Report." Her voice echoed across the cavernous, empty bridge.
"Nebula-class scout vessel Farsight recovered. Hull integrity twelve percent." The AI adjutant's synthesized voice held no inflection. "Life signs: zero. Energy signature anomalous. Not a reactor type on record."
Astra's right eye—a silver mechanical optic—swept over the holographic star map. Her left, with its remnant amber iris, constricted. On the map, markers for unknown energy sources proliferated like cancer cells.
"All hands, this is not a drill." She opened the fleet-wide channel, her voice turning sharp as a plasma torch. "First contact protocols active. Weapons free, threat level Crimson. Arbiter, advance."
The bridge shuddered beneath her boots. The four hundred and fifty thousand-ton interstellar command ship Arbiter tore through the void.
---
Three hours later, she stood on the shattered bridge of the Farsight. The corpses were gone, processed by the auto-reclaimers, but the air still tasted of ionized blood and despair. She knelt, her metallic right hand reaching into a buckled deck plate seam. Her fingers closed around a fragment.
It wasn't metal. Wasn't ceramic. Some kind of biomaterial, its edges still twitching faintly, like dying worms.
"Genomic sequence is being decoded," came the voice of Science Officer Ellison in her ear. "The structure... it's unprecedented. Partial nucleotide alignment resembles archaic Earth biology, but the majority is novel. This looks like..."
"A weapon," Astra cut in, her single eye fixed on the fragment. "Weaponized life."
The alarm screamed again, this time from external sensors.
"Captain! Spatial distortion! Multiple unknown signals emerging from the rift! Count three hundred... five hundred... Mother of stars, they're still coming!"
Astra turned. Her mag-boots shrieked against the deck as she sprinted back to her shuttle. The tactical holodisplay was already unfolding before her. The sector map bled red—a torrent of hostile markers.
"All vessels, battle array! Activate Litany Protocol!"
The Arbiter's weapon arrays unfolded. Fusion warheads armed. The energy shield ballooned outward like a colossal jellyfish. Astra sank back into her command throne, her spine re-connecting to the tactical feed. A river of data, a waterfall of stars, flooded her consciousness.
Then she saw them.
Not ships.
Creatures.
Vast, silent, manta-ray shaped organisms, gliding with impossible elegance through the vacuum, wingspans stretching over a kilometer. Their skin drank the starlight, edges blurred, like living silhouettes. No engine flare. No energy signature. They simply were, and then they moved.
The first volley came from the human fleet.
Plasma lances, missiles, railgun slugs tore the silent dark. Beams struck one of the creatures—it shuddered, its skin parting. What erupted wasn't blood, but a cloud of luminescent spores. The spores spread in the vacuum, drifting onto the energy shields of the nearest human cruisers.
The shields overloaded. Flickered. Died.
A second creature gaped—if that vast maw could be called a mouth. No sound traveled in vacuum, but every ship's sensors registered a pulse, a frequency perfectly tuned to the resonant peak of human neurons.
Half the fleet's crews seized, bodies convulsing in uncontrollable fits.
Astra bit her tongue hard. The pain, coupled with her implants' dampeners, snapped her back. She watched the fleet formation disintegrate. She watched ships explode in perfect silence. She watched escape pods scatter like panicked fireflies.
Her right eye, the mechanical one, tracked the attack patterns. Not random. Precise. Efficient. Chillingly elegant. They were adapting. Learning. Growing deadlier by the second.
"Retreat order given, but Third Fleet is caught in a gravity well," her adjutant reported, a crack finally appearing in his tone. "They're trapped."
On the holomap, the red markers began consuming the blue. A cruiser was caught between two of the creatures. The hull folded, then ruptured. The wreckage was... absorbed, becoming new, chitinous growths on the creatures' skin.
They're feeding on our ships.
"Ellison," Astra's voice was terrifyingly calm. "Spore composition."
"Working... Stars above. They contain a prion variant, targeted to human brain proteins. And nanoscale mechanics, actively disassembling shield generators. This isn't natural evolution, Captain. This is design."
"Whose design?"
"Unknown. But there's a... repeated marker in the genome. Like a signature."
Astra's eye narrowed. She called up the data from the biomaterial fragment, cross-referenced it with the spore genome.
Match: 99.7%.
They didn't find the Farsight.
It led them here.
"All ships," she commanded, her voice like cryo-steel. "Concentrate fire on the largest target. Do not aim for center mass. Target the third fold on the right anterior wing. That's the nerve cluster."
"How do you know?" Ellison asked.
"Because if I designed it, that's where I'd put the brain." Astra activated the Arbiter's primary weapon—a singularity cannon capable of cracking a small moon. "Fire."
The singularity projectile carved a warp in reality. The largest creature tried to evade. Too slow. The black-hole energy bloomed in its right wing. The fold tore open. Luminescent fluid gushed out like a miniature supernova.
The entire swarm froze.
Then, as one, every remaining creature turned toward the Arbiter.
"They're locked on us," the adjutant said.
"Good." Astra smiled, an expression that hadn't touched her face in years, sharp and hot. "Full retreat. Plot a course for the gravitic lens at 'Echo Abyss'."
"That's an uncharted rift! Mortality rate for random transition is—"
"Eighty-five percent. Staying here is one hundred. Execute."
The Arbiter's engines flared, dragging the remnants of the fleet toward the edge of the map. The swarm pursued, their grace replaced by a cold, methodical fury.
Astra watched the tactical feed, her mechanical iris spinning, calculating distance, velocity, gravitational variables. Her flesh eye watched the approaching abyss.
Six hours of pursuit. Three more ships lost.
"The lens is ahead," Navigation reported. "We have no safe transition data!"
"Don't need it." Astra disconnected from the throne and stood. She walked to the observation pane. Outside, the rift in the cosmos glowed—the light of stars twisted, a wound in reality itself.
The swarm closed in. The largest was almost upon them.
"All hands, brace for impact. Redirect all shield power to structural integrity. Shut down non-essential systems."
"Including life support?"
"Including life support."
She returned to her throne. Reconnected. The data-rush was a familiar, painful friend.
"Ellison. Encode the genetic signature. Broadcast it to all known colonies. Highest priority encryption."
"What message?"
Astra looked through the pane. The largest creature opened its maw. Inside was not darkness, but a pulsing, nebula-like structure.
"Send this: 'They are here. They remember. Trust neither steel nor flesh. Find the third path.'"
Then, to the AI: "Enter the rift."
Space tore.
Gravity became a giant's fist, crushing the hull. Metal screamed. Light twisted into impossible shapes. Astra felt her consciousness stretched, shattered, reconstituted. Sparks erupted from her mechanical eye. Her left eye saw colors that had no name in any spectrum.
In that chaos, she glimpsed it.
Not a creature.
Not a ship.
A... structure. So vast comprehension failed. So ancient time itself was a child's scribble beside it. The manta-creatures were mere cilia on its surface.
It slept in the depths of the rift. And the fragment from the Farsight was a key, accidentally turned in a lock.
Then darkness took everything.
---
Astra woke in med-bay. Her right eye had been replaced, new sensors calibrating. Her left eye focused on Ellison's exhausted face.
"We lost sixty percent of the crew," the science officer said. "But... we survived. They didn't follow."
"They didn't need to." Astra tried to sit up. Her body felt like a discarded doll. "They know where we're going."
"What?"
"The Echo Abyss isn't a natural phenomenon. It's a wound. A wound suffered by... something... so long ago it still bleeds gravitational waves. Those creatures are leukocytes, Ellison. We just jumped into an immune system."
Silence filled the med-bay, broken only by the drip of life support.
"The Farsight..."
"Was an infected probe. Deliberately. Someone, or something, fought that... entity... eons ago. The fragment is a piece of their weapon. And now the immune system is awake."
Ellison paled. "You're saying we just took the blame for an ancient war?"
Astra opened her eyes. The new mechanical one had finished calibrating. Its silver iris reflected the cold med-bay light.
"No," she said. "I'm saying the war never ended. We just heard the opening bell."
The ship-wide comm chimed. "Captain. Priority communication from High Command. All surviving vessels are to rendezvous at 'Ark' station. They're calling it... the Endgame Protocol."
Astra met Ellison's gaze.
"And," the adjutant added, an unfamiliar tremor in his voice, "they request the Arbiter's logs and commanding officer for immediate... debrief and accountability review."
Astra pushed herself upright. Her metal spine hummed.
"Reply to High Command: Data is encrypted. Key is with me. If they want accountability, they can come address the Void Sovereign herself."
She paused, her single eye fixed on the unfamiliar stars outside the viewport.
"Then initiate Shadow Protocol. Scrub all non-essential records pertaining to the Farsight mission. Alter course. We are not going to Ark."
"Where, Captain?"
Astra touched the med-bay viewport. The cold synth-glass reflected her face: half scarred, weary flesh; half cold, unfeeling machine.
"To find the third path."
Engines reignited. The Arbiter turned, wounded but unbroken, carrying a secret and a warning into the unmapped dark.
And in the depths of the rift, the leukocytes of the ancient structure shifted their search parameters. A new command propagated through the living network, simple and final:
Locate the carrier. Purge the infection. At any cost.
The first shot of the deep war had been fired. Astra Nova knew the next would be hers to fire—whether the target was an alien leviathan, or the human command that had sent her to die.
Her right eye, mechanical and silver, gleamed in the dim light.
The hunt was on.